Apocalypse Now: It still smells like victory

By PETER CALDER

The coast, thick with jungle and seen from afar, is silver in the half-light. The Doors' Jim Morrison intones his famous, diabolically elegiac line, "This is the end, beautiful friend", and the entire landscape erupts in a fireball.

It was, by any standards, a great start for a film. And, 23 years later, Apocalypse Now still possesses a retina-burning force, the power to shock and upend our ideas of what the movies might do.

Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War masterpiece was a sprawling, bloated, brilliant, unrestrained tour de force, a concentrated antidote to the racist sludge of The Deer Hunter the year before (never mind the original Vietnam film, the gung-ho 1968 John Wayne vehicle The Green Berets).

Inspired by, though scarcely based on, Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, set in the Belgian Congo, it followed a troubled American officer (Martin Sheen) upriver on a mission to "terminate, with extreme prejudice" a decorated colonel (Marlon Brando) who had flipped and set himself up as a despotic jungle ruler.

The journey depicted America's grand folly in Vietnam and Cambodia (it was actually shot in the Philippines) as a surrealistic, drug-propelled, explosives-packed carnival ride. Yet there wasn't a trick shot in it, much less any of the computer-generated images so vital to modern action movies.

In lending the film so much context, time has given it more teeth. The fabulous 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, based on footage shot and diaries kept by Coppola's wife, Eleanor, confirmed the rumours about the movie's making: the wild cost overruns, the prodigious drugtaking (it had Dennis Hopper in it, after all) and Sheen's stress-induced heart attack.

In the process it revealed how literally the director had been speaking at Cannes a few months before the film was released when he said that it was made "very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam". "We were in the jungle, we had access to too much money [and] too much equipment and little by little we went insane."

Nearly a quarter-century later, and several geopolitical lifetimes after the events it depicts, Apocalypse Now Redux arrives after a couple of festival screenings. The new version clocks in at 203 minutes, adding a little over 45 minutes to the original, and its title ("redux", originally a medical term, suggests restoration to a healthy state) is a clue to the director's intentions.

So is his "Director's Statement" in which he says that the original was "the film that we thought would work for the mainstream audience of its day ... as much a genre war film as possible."

The implication that he regards the eyepopping first version as somehow formulaic gives some clue as to what may be expected here. The redux version adds two long scenes and amplifies others, linking them more explicitly into what follows. Thus it leaves intact Robert Duvall's scenes as the unforgettable Colonel Kilgore ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning") but adds a helpful sequence which explains why the boat crew flee the mayhem he creates.

Whether the larger changes improve on the original is a matter for debate. The longest addition - a scene set in a French plantation whose owners have maintained a private army which has kept the war at bay - is jarringly romantic and, not least because it has large slabs of unsubtitled French dialogue, interrupts the rhythm and flow of the film's (and the soldiers') journey.

On the other hand, a long sequence in which the Playboy playmates who had entertained the troops at a riverside floorshow are rediscovered marooned and drugged to the eyeballs at an abandoned field ambulance station, is a potent addition to the sense of unease and disjuncture.

In the end, though we may resent the tampering with such a cinematic icon, we have to remember that it's the author who is doing the tampering. And Apocalypse Now is big enough to sustain the assault of reinterpretation.

Even if we find the redux a reduction, there's enough left to remind us that they don't make movies like they used to.

* Apocalypse Now Redux opens at the Rialto on Thursday.